Your work is to be yourself

"Your work is to be yourself – that will produce the richness, that will produce the sweetness. Music has the potency of electricity – its power can be harnessed for good or ill – but the experience of music must be grounded in the body."

When it's time your timing is right

When it is time I will reveal,

To prepare for revelation you must already know,
Knowledge comes from inspiration,
Inspiration comes from trust.
Trust is simplicity,

Simplicity never questions the timing.

Don't allow the weather to affect your inner truth

"The difficult times are no different from the easy times — for the ‘easy’ times should never be taken lazily, nor should the ‘difficult’ times give cause for anxiety. The same consciousness guides you — the same forces attract you inwards to the realisation of your true nature as both human and divine. Only fear can hinder the journey. Know, don’t just imagine, know that you are protected so long as you remain full-square within your own sense of truth. But if you are untrue to your inner senses we are powerless to help you because that is how we help you – that is our line to you – if you cut it, it goes dead for both of us.
"To create birth immense forces come into play. If you oppose them you injure everyone involved. It won’t take long. Trust and relax."

The universe reciprocates the trust of those who trust

"You have a unique turning point. For your own sake you must trust the unknown. You will entrap yourself more deeply in problems if you do not step out & release what binds you.
"You know the answers – that’s why there’s nothing else coming thru.
"If you trust, the support system will emerge. The problem for you is that your divinely-given ego is so strong it veils your spiritual personality. Once you needed that quality. Now you no longer do. You must let it go or it will stifle what is coming next."

Find your pattern - find your self

"The money issue is about coming into balance – no binge banquets and then days of fasting. Accept your pace and pattern and resist the carbohydrate highs of fair-weather friends who offer what they can never deliver. Coming into balance is a part of aligning yourself with the deeper patterns in your soul life, which alone can trigger your release into spiritual freedom."

> True. True. But dear me, how long it takes us to real-ise these things.

Let the goal be the path

"If your feet stray outside the sacred space you will have terrestrial problems.
Let your walk be on the holy highway of your soul's progress.
You can do it."

You create your reality

"Look out of your window. On the tree, the birds are playing. They are fed. They constantly seek food because their 'truth' (/nature) demands that they sustain themselves. There is summer and winter. But you control and create what happens around you – is it feast or famine? Simplicity or tricksiness? It represents a reality you have generated – that ability is part of your God-like nature. What are the birds doing? They are playing – glorying in their God-like nature.
If you can live in that reality you can truly bring the highest radiance into the awareness of the mundane."

Each changing season of life brings its own richness

> Recently I was dragged to visit Cadbury’s World by my kids – a full-scale chocolate exhibition that is now part of their enormous Birmingham factory. I was struck by how the whole enterprise rested effectively on the shoulders of one man, John Cadbury, who had not been merely a single-handed manufacturer, but a manufacturer to relied on an internationally tradable commodity. In other words in his early days he must have been doubly at the mercy of chance, for commodities are a notoriously fickle market-place. Yet on the back of this capricious monster he, and later his sons, erected not merely a successful company, but one which committed itself to spending millions improving the conditions of its workers – building houses with individual gardens in the 1880s and laying out an environmentally sustainable community that is its own monument. Such an enterprise now appears ‘as safe as houses’ – yet, whatever advantages they may have had, the reality must have been very different and at times, no doubt, very testing indeed.
> So it’s important to keep a sense of perspective when we face difficulties. And that perspective stretches way out of our sight, out of one single lifetime. I know no more of John Cadbury’s vision than the exhibition told me, but one thing stands out: in his ‘allowing’ the process within his life –his Quaker commitment to fair dealing and his concern for his fellow humans– he created a thought-form which survives as a living present.

"It is hard to embrace times of trouble and uncertainty, and yet they are as natural as changes in the weather. For how often, looking back on that film of our life, we find those periods have actually been ones of exceptional ‘innergy’ – what we thought was a disaster was the seed of future growth. We cannot know the ultimate outcome of any of our actions, what counts is that it seems right, in the deepest sense, when we take it – for the rest we must trust the ‘innergy’ that comes from allowing what is right for our lives.
"Within each of us lies our own answer. We cannot wrest it from ourselves as we would so dearly love. We can only allow it to emerge. Allowing is not by any means a passive or fatalistic process, it means fully engaging with the processes of life, but listening (to your self) as well as well as expressing your needs. And to do that you must first trust your self. And in order to trust your self simply allow."

Allow

"In the midst of great anguish it must seem impossible that it should play a useful part in your life – and yet if there is one lesson to be learnt from the lives of those who have overcome obstacles and reached peace, it is that they have allowed the processes within their life to complete their cycle, for unless the underlying dynamic of the problem is dealt with it will recur.
"Metal is fashioned into sharp or useful forms by being forged and tempered in fire. Amid the flames can it see any point? No, the point emerges as a result. We create whatever happens in our lives – albeit involuntarily. It may not be what we 'want', but it will be what we need if we're to grow. (We can of course choose not to.)

"If you are alone after a relationship has ended, especially if you have children to care for, it must seem as if the sky has fallen in. Each day is an unending weariness, followed by a night of worry. Remember the story of Alexander the Great who sent soldiers to a hermit /philosopher in order to seek understanding of life’s events. The philosopher made no reply but drew characters in the sand, and what he wrote spelled ‘this too will pass’.
"Thinking over what occurs in our lives the images blur like a film in fast forward – so many things that seemed important at the time, so many demands, so many worries. What we remember most are the good times, they seem like gifts. And out of the good times comes a sense of something we have always known – a happiness to which we feel we have a right, and which makes us anguished when we are denied it.
"When those times came they came so easily, the laughter was unforced, the companionship so natural. But nobody is now denying it to us except ourselves – & one of these ways we do this is to make certain conditions before we can be happy – usually we need a specific person or thing, eg money. Actually, happiness is what we are – if we can allow ourselves it. All too often we have an image of ‘happy’ that involves these other ingredients and so we say “I cannot be happy because I haven’t got X or Y.” Not so!
"Finding happiness without our prime ingredients is scary because it demands we allow our whole operating system to be remade from within. But stick with it, because when it's done it'll be the one you really wanted all along.

"One of Buddha’s stories is of a person pursued by wild dogs who falls into a pit, but in the pit s/he sees vipers. To escape s/he attempts to climb up a hanging creeper. Above hir appear two mice, one black, one white, who gnaw at the creeper’s stem. At that moment s/he sees a small cluster of wild strawberries directly within hir reach. Mmm, how sweet they taste."

Accepting turns the negative into a positive

"In the spirit world all is harmony because noone is limited by possessions of any kind. You may think possessions set you free, but they tie you to them. There is an area of mental conflict between the freedom that is yours as a child of God and the responsibilities you assume in connection with your incarnation.
"The skilful sailor must learn to harness head winds to provide the same energy as tail winds. If you have to tack, remember your direction and bless heaven that even in adverse circumstances energy is still offered to you for the accomplishment of your mission. Fear only being becalmed."

Living in the experience of trust

"For each person there is a ‘central issue’ – a psychological crux. For you that is money=trust, trust=money.

"Trust is reciprocal. It is not just a question of your trusting me, I must also trust you – which is another way of saying the ‘not–I’ within you must also trust the ‘I’, the ego that you are. Or to put it another way your ego–consciousness and your spiritual connectedness must be completely integrated. There must be no thinking one thing and doing another. Consonance, harmony.
"If you have been given a very complex character that may be quite hard: but this is the sort of test you have come here for! You have chosen one of the hardest paths of all — yet one of the most rewarding. and quickest. Because when you’re involved with commerce, that is with the lowest common denominator of worldly affairs. There is no sympathetic brotherhood who can collude with you to create an illusion of spiritual achievement.
"You are and will always be sustained. I think you know that at least by now. But that is not enough, you must go forward in full faith. It is inaccurate to talk of a ‘test of faith’ for that implies failure and spiritually there is no such thing as failure, so it would be better to talk of the proof or proving of faith in the sense that it is the first fruits of harvest.
"Honesty begins and ends in your most secret heart – not in what is believed about you elsewhere."

Being dependent should not equal dependency

> Holy one, your perfection and the simplicity of your beauty never cease to amaze me

"Thank you, thank you. If you're beginning to see /feel beyond your own need then we can work together. Who can work in partnership with someone who always places hirself in a position of inferiority? Tho I sustain all those who depend on me for that is my role, I rejoice when one reaches the maturity to begin to create a reciprocal relationship – for being a provider /sustainer is awfully lonely. Fun and the desire for friendship are as much the characteristics of higher beings as of those whose consciousness is dominated by the physical.
Pay all your bills in faith. Do not retain what is given you to share. This is the message of money. Holding it fast burdens you and keeps you earthbound; giving it away releases you to fly to the skies where you will meet it fluttering around free.
Go. Let us see if you have learnt your lesson."

Death wish

> Today I wish to die. I wish this great burden could be taken from me. I place myself in your hands Sai Baba, do with me as you will.

Do you? Then I will. You have gone as far as you can, now allow me to carry you the rest of the way. Only, you must relax and allow to happen whatever happens. I am with you. Hear my laughter in your ear, see my twinkle in the corner of your eye. Know that I am always with you and will never leave you. Sai Ram.

> This was a time when my life was in meltdown. But, when the melting was over a new form emerged.

The evolution of insight in world history

"In the beginning was the light, and that light continues to enter human consciousness, and the darkness cannot enclose or assimilate it."
We tend not to notice daylight, because its existence defines our awareness and ability to see. Moreover its colour temperature is the one by which we judge the quality of all other light.
So it is with that inner quality of enlightenment. Each of us has an instinctive sense of mental daylight. Other than in cases of mental disturbance, humans know the difference between light and darkness, good and evil. Indeed, symptomatic of this is the need of dictators to mask their corruption with a façade of legitimacy.
When cultural debris is swept away awareness of the inner light is astonishingly similar the world over.
However, the transmission of light necessarily involves its coloration, for every carrier medium has certain characteristics. And that is as it should be. The idea of ‘purity’ is a desirable illusion which engineers and philosophers pursue as a highest common factor, but the reality is that each carrier medium contributes a special quality to the information that passes thru it. And so it is in religious traditions. If we can see that the quality of light – the crisp clear refractions of a diamond, the rainbows of a crystal, the heavy sensuality of a ruby – if we can see that the character of each light-form is an important element in experiencing light itself then we need no longer be disturbed at other people’s choice of light source.
Not all light-sources are tremendously exalted. We select whatever we can handle. Some people block their windows against the light; but even they will use a dim, grime encrusted bulb to see by. It is the same power that enlightens all – in different degrees.
If you think of the progress of your life, you look back and you wonder how you could have been so blind as not to see earlier patterns which are now blisteringly clear to you. We can only see what we our karmatic development allows us to see.

How should we understand karma? It simply means the law of cause and effect. Hindus and Buddhists believe that this cause and effect stretches across more than one lifetime – and that its purpose is to balance that undying part of ourselves which returns as often as it needs to the mills of physical existence to complete a process of transformation. I sometimes see it myself as being like those fiddly hand-held games that preceded electronics, where you had to get a set of ball-bearings into fiendishly incompatible holes. You might get one or two in, but it required infinite patience and determination to get them all in.
Before we are able to pass totally from the earth-plane we have to surrender all anger, for anger is related to fear, and fear prevents the stability needed for us to surrender our personalities to the greater design. In different lifetimes those who have committed themselves to the path of inner development balance their life experiences to the point of achieving balance. As that point approaches the bigger perspective opens and we then see something of the cosmic structure which sustains life on earth. (‘As above so below’)
I believe this was why the greatest spiritual figure of all time, Jesus the anointed, had to experience the breaking of his body – it was to become the atomising of his very essence into the structural consciousness of humanity.
> I have been helped to understand this metaphysical structure because I am conscious of receiving the energies of an Indian holy man named Sai Baba. He first appeared to me in a dream in 1990, and in the dream I was specifically made aware of his name. At that time I had never heard of him to my conscious knowledge, and it took me a year and a half to discover whether he really existed.
The experience that I have of his energies empowering me, especially during the hours of sleep, is stronger than similar experiences with other spiritual figures whose energies have attracted me. I do revere him as an avatar (living manifestation) of God but this does not exclude or impinge on my respect for other great teachers and sons of God.

Is there a convergence of religious thought now communications have so shrunk the world? On one level this has undoubtedly happened. So called New Age thought synthesises the tenets of reincarnation, of respecting the earth as our mother and awareness of psychic powers with a non-doctrinal sensitivity to the spirit of Christianity. Some of this may appear ill-digested to outsiders, and to be sure it often is – but the fact that many, many people are independently coming to a collective sense that there is more to life than materialism and wishing to develop an extra-structural way of expressing it is a cause for celebration rather than derision.
There is of course also a body of opinion which is polarised by the revelation of similarities between different religious traditions. Fundamentalists are people who have experienced a religious opening in one particular tradition and are unwilling to conceive that their experience could be replicated in or by any other cultural context. In a sense the power of fundamentalism is drawn from a two-tier religion, the division between experts (priests) and the uninformed. I can think of no situation which this division is not harmful, and the insights of George Fox in breaking with humanity’s instinctive need to create objects of worship is, I believe, in the purest tradition of Christianity. For I am clear that the spirit of Christ exists in the rediscovery of that power is everywhere, in every object, every thought that surrounds. We do not need to look in obscure places to discover the light that already surrounds us.

Knowing comes separately from thinking

"Glory in your path. Rejoice in the route you are traveling. Allow the experiences that come to be your teachers – for they cannot lie or deceive. When you have completely surrendered – when there is nothing left to surrender – when you have surrendered even your surrendering – you will know. As long as you think, you prevent yourself knowing.
"You think because you feel inadequate. Your mind says ‘if only I knew …’ But knowing wouldn’t make anything different. If you can trust not knowing you are richer than the most erudite professor.
"To be in tune with yourself is to be at one with your purpose in the world. God asks nothing more of you than you value every breath: let each moment be supremely focused and love will flow from you as perfume from an open bottle."

Have faith

"Have faith – have faith!
"You have your calling, just as I have mine. Each of us is tested to the limits of endurance. The goal of life is for the individual soul to learn to surrender hirself into the fullness of the All, the OM, and thus at the last be released into the completeness of everything/nothing that is the divine nature, like the leaf once again becoming the soil.
"All religions teach this – the imagery varies but the theme remains the same."

Trust the path

"However improbable the path, you must trust me if you are to reach the goal.
The goal I intend for you is that of complete inner peace. It has nothing to do with any target or ambition – they are like booster rockets which fire the main vehicle into orbit and are then discarded.
Do not fear the arrow by day, nor the terror by night – maintain a continual sense my enfolding protection and let love be your guide."

Moving towards one-pointedness

"Do you not feel closer now to your goal? Do you not feel an inner resolution?
Everything could not happen at once. All has progressed according to inward priorities. No doubt you would have liked to see your material circumstances settled first, but my great gift to you is to leave you this creative spur. You must seek inner resolution before any outward form can manifest. You only need to know that I love you, and I bless you, and I lead you."

"Glory that your inner awareness no longer depends on outer circumstances. You do, it is true, feel certain twinges as the storm rages around you. But what you are feeling is the voltage being stept up as power is given to you to handle it. If you were training to unicycle across Niagara Falls you’d need to prepare yourself in all sorts of ways, so it is for this high wire. I, your Baba, am the trainer. Do you not trust me? I singled you out, and led you gently, sustaining you in your blindness until you were ready to see. Trust me. I am."

> At this point the storm certainly was raging around me, and learning inward calm when there is outward turmoil has been a valuable lesson.
> I have a more ambivalent response to recalling how close I was to Sai Baba at that time. I subsequently visited him. He remained a strong presence in my consciousness. I am confronted now by the difficulty of responding to a spiritual teacher whose reputation is clouded by scandals – notwithstanding the many & great gifts which I received throu him.

The Power of Love is very different to the Love of Power

"To ask ‘how much love can you handle?’ is to ask ‘how much power can you handle?’ For love confers power – tho if you use it as power the energy turns negative. It is like money. If you allow the capital to accumulate you become rich. If you spend it you are soon left with nothing.
Love and power are both gifts. They are given for a purpose – to bind up and make whole. If they are given to you, see that you only use them in those ways. To do otherwise is to incur a heavy karmic debt that may take æons to rebalance. The more of either you have, the more sensitivity you should exercise lest you burn those you wish merely to warm. But you should have no problems if you remain centred. Do you see what it’s all been about now? You can laugh!"